Flames climb trees like circus performers on rope. Each inhale burns deep into his stomach and the heat leaves no space in his mind to consider escape. He imagines the gallons of water in his pack evaporating, his tongue scorching like the earth, his skin blackening. Around him, people are yelling orders, reminding him of something, but the roar of the fire and the crash of branches to the ground are all he hears.
And then, even then, Lou remembers. Two months before, he saw a woman across the room at a party he should never have been at and he felt, for the second time, a tug in his gut that would draw a clear line between the before and after of the moment. He went to her, and with every step he felt himself slipping further away. She smiled at him, she fiddled with her hair, and she rearranged her body, bending towards him. But Lou did not notice. Whatever self had tried to stop the approach at all was left on the other side of the room, and it was only his body now going through the motions of seduction.
They found an empty room and took off their own clothes. Lou felt the familiar warmth of arousal and ripped the condom wrapper, remembering for a flicker that the self he had vacated should be there in protest. Beneath him, the woman felt pliable and diffident, but she moaned at the right moments and his body responded. It didn’t last long. He heard himself groan and the instant he pulled out, all his senses rushed back to life. His skin felt hot and clammy, her floral perfume nauseated him, and when she spoke his name he recoiled. He stared at her sparkling eyes, the rose vine tattoos climbing her stomach, and he knew it was all wrong.
“Stafford, branch!” he hears. Something thuds near him but he forgets how he is supposed to react. Hands push him forward. “Move it!” He does, grasping the unburnt corners with his gloved hands and hefting it into the patch of black, all the muscles in his upper body screaming. I’m not supposed to be here, he thinks.
In the room with the woman, music pulsing outside the door, Lou had wanted to run. He wanted to go back to the self he abandoned across the room and undo everything after. For the first time since he split into two, he thought of Rachel. He thought of how she had looked at him, asking for so much more than he could give. Probably, she was still in her bed, hurting and bleeding and trying to forget. The bed where he left her.
First, she had been angry. “Are you fucking serious?” she said. “You’re going to just walk away?” He had been angrier. Her voice, though loud, hardly registered through the thrum of his mind. His face blazed and his fists clenched beside him. The balcony beckoned. He just wanted it to stop. Rachel muffled her scream into a pillow where she sat. Her whole body trembled. Lou couldn’t breathe.
“Stop,” he said. “Just stop, stop, stop.”
They met on his 17th birthday, the beginnings of summer, when he was high at a park and she waltzed in on the arm of his old friend. She looked serious, perhaps even forlorn, until a smile crept onto her face. Senses heightened to the fumes from passing cars and the cool breeze around him, Lou wanted to kiss her. But his friend was the one wrapped around Rachel’s waist and when he pulled her to him, Lou watched her smile shift back to a grimace.Lou is on day eight of his first fire run, and he is certain that he has made nothing but mistakes since that night at the party.
They didn’t talk that night, but Lou began inviting his friend over more, hoping he would bring Rachel. Then the friend left for college and their relationship disintegrated soon after.
When he heard, Lou rode his bike to Rachel’s house without a plan. She saw him through the window and let that slow smile spread again. By the time the school year started, they did not know an afternoon without the other.
Lou is on day eight of his first fire run, and he is certain that he has made nothing but mistakes since that night at the party. Now, with the fire growing closer, he has forgotten all the training he swore he committed to memory and wants only to run. But running is not allowed, nor is abandoning the other 19 members of his crew—yet it is the only way he knows how to survive.
When he was ten, Lou returned home from soccer practice to find his parents suspended in emotion. His mother hunched in tears on the couch, arms folded around herself, rocking. His father stood five feet away, face all despair, fist bloody. Behind him, a hole in the wall still shuddered as if in fear. When he saw Lou walk in, he inhaled sharply.
“I’m sorry,” his father said, glancing back at his wife, then slid past Lou and out the door.
After that, Lou saw his father every other weekend, when they would sometimes go fishing but mostly sit side by side on a brown leather couch in a nearly empty apartment staring at the television together. Eventually, this shifted to the dark blue couch in the beach-themed living room of his father’s new girlfriend, who would soon give birth to the child they had conceived when Lou’s parents were still together. As the baby grew, Lou felt his own significance shrinking in his father’s eyes and retreated first to his mother, and then to the soft numbness of weed.
His mother never talked about what had happened. She simply carried on, working 50 hours a week as a nurse, and when Lou mentioned his father she scowled, shaking her head.
As he got older, Lou remembered more clearly the nights he had spent under his covers, humming to himself and trying to drown out the noise of his parents fighting. He would open his window and stick his head outside or stand in his closet and pull as many shirts as he could against his ears. He would whisper nonsense phrases like the witch is a bitch with an itch over and over to himself until he lost track of the words. But it was never enough to dampen the crash of a dish or his mother’s unbridled scream. When it got that bad, all the fear that had consumed him moments before evaporated, his body went numb, and he believed he was floating above himself, safe in some other world.
Lou learned to pick up on the subtle changes indicating an impending fight. His mother’s pursed lips, his father’s rolling eyes, or a sudden shifted tone in conversation. When their voices grew quiet and slow, Lou knew he needed to disappear.
When Rachel told him she was pregnant, Lou imagined himself holding his baby, all soft skin and smooth folds, and he felt something dislodge itself inside of him. The baby had no features, just a handful of hair and an orb of protection around it, and Lou believed for the first time in years that he was not destined to failure. He saw Rachel glowing and spent on the hospital bed, her hair full of sweat and frizz, and he felt her relief as he took the baby from her and she drifted to sleep. Tears welled in his eyes and he was so lost in the future unfolding before him that he almost didn’t hear what she said next.
“And I’m getting an abortion,” she said. Her voice was measured and sure. Her eyes stayed steady on him. It was a declaration, not a discussion. As quickly as it had come, that small part of him that was free hardened, withered, and wedged itself back into the pit of his stomach. He knew there was no getting it back. Though he did not want to, he watched his hand reach for hers, watched his head nod and watched his mouth say, Okay. I understand. I love you. But something malevolent was already growing from that pit and a darkness descended in him like the winter outside.
When he met Rachel, Lou’s days had become clearer and snapped into focus. What before had obscured into an endless stream of school, weed, and avoiding his parents was now infused with meaning. His choices suddenly mattered. He did not care what the world thought of him, but he cared deeply what Rachel thought. The blare of his alarm clock brought a hint of hope instead of dread. Thoughts of his future had once summoned shades of gray, but with
Rachel in it the patterns took shape.
But once she dangled that brightest of futures before him and snatched it away before he could claim it, he felt the careful outlines of his bettered self collapse around him. In the days following her confession, the ambient buzz from his childhood returned, a kind of white noise that chipped away at his connection to not only Rachel but also himself. On the outside, all went on as before. But on the inside, he spiraled further each day.
Weeks passed before she went to the clinic. New buds sprouted on trees and melting snow revealed green grass beneath it. Lou’s grades suffered. His teachers assumed it was the apathy of approaching graduation—they had never expected much out of him anyway. His mother grew frustrated with his mumbled words and the messes he increasingly left around the house. Rachel started more fights, seeking any emotion from him, but he left her attempts unacknowledged, retreating further within.
On a Friday afternoon, they drove together to the clinic. He barely registered the faces of the people in the waiting room, many burdened with fear and others hope or relief. After they called Rachel’s name, he sat staring at his phone, unable to comprehend what he saw. Time was passing, but he had no sense of it. She returned a second or an hour or a year later and she smiled at him, her face then full of gratitude. She hugged him, but the body he held no longer infused his own with that particular warmth of love.
And then, they were in her house, and she was curled under blankets, he said he had to go. She thought he was joking. Then: shock, disbelief, anger, the screaming.
“Stop, stop, stop,” he had said. Her tears transformed. They weakened. They were sobs of sorrow, forecasts of his abandonment, his betrayal. He saw her heartache, how much he was failing her, but his own grief was so huge and buried that he knew only the primal instinct ingrained from his father to go.
And so he went. To the party where he saw the woman across the room and left his self just to follow her into an empty room. By then, the abortion was both the only thing and the last thing on his mind. The woman gazed at him expectantly, and he could not bring himself to leave her, too. So he stayed. He held her like he was unable to hold Rachel. Never mind that only half of him was there, in the moment he most needed to leave, he could not.
When he was driving to Rachel’s the next day, he saw a sign planted in the grass calling for wildland firefighters. Lou realized he was shaking and pulled over. He stared at the sign, summoning all the stories and qualities he attached to firefighting. They were brave, strong, and resilient. Communities worshipped and praised and loved them. He wanted those things. He wanted to feel like a hero. His fingers dialed the number. His voice answered yes to their screening questions and his ears heard them say to come in the next week for a fitness test and training. He hung up the phone. His car was still running.
But when he told Rachel the truth, what he had done, she forgave him. After the tears and the questions and the punching of pillows, she blew her nose, looked him in the eyes, and said, Okay. I understand. I love you. She swallowed another ibuprofen and asked him to lay with her.
He did, with all parts of him, but he knew he deserved none of her.
He barely passed the physical test, a three-mile hike carrying a 50-pound pack. 45 minutes was the limit—he had one to spare. The technical training was dense and he was not certain that he could make the right choice in the literal heat of the moment. The men and a few women around him seemed hardened and tough, like they knew exactly what they had just signed up for. They had tattoos and big muscles and made raunchy jokes. Lou became quiet and self-conscious.
A week before he received his first fire call, Lou told Rachel it was over.
“I’m not enough for you,” he said. “I’m not even enough for myself.”
She protested. She told him, again, that she forgave him, that she understood how his emotions had gotten the best of him. She reminded him of how much they had built together in a year, how much they needed each other now that the future was uncertain. She promised him that she wanted him, wanted to work it out together.
He shook his head. “I can’t,” he said. So he left, and for the next week he masked his devastation with weed and screens and sleep. Until the call came early one morning to be at the base in an hour, and suddenly he was flooded with adrenaline and purpose. On the drive to the base, he felt the excitement of unlocking a new secret, of inching closer to the truth of the world.
On fire, he decided, I’ll understand.
The first few days were more a blur of excruciating and tedious physical labor, long stretches of time with nothing but his surroundings to distract him, and even longer nights on uneven ground in his tent, shivering despite being mere miles from a forest fire.The people he is sure will die with him do not even know him.
On day five, the weight of it all hit him with so much force he nearly dropped the hose he was holding. Rachel, the baby, the girl at the party, his father. Grief expanded from that corner of his stomach where he had caged it for so long and it engulfed every inch of him. A gasp escaped his mouth, but nobody heard it. He felt pain everywhere, and his heart was so constricted he almost alerted the man nearest him that he was surely on the brink of death. His mind was all darkness and he wanted, desperately, something to numb it. He was sure these feelings would never end, that he would be trapped in this hole forever, but then he was moving, following the back of someone much stronger than him, and in the movement some of his edges softened, patches of light emerged.
He spent most of that night awake in his tent, crying and heaving and rocking. Outside, the winds howled and men snored. Even in his despair, he forced himself to remain silent, to invite no one into the truth of his pain. Nothing made it better, but he found that alone, he was unable to stop the deluge of emotions, and so they kept pouring.
In the morning, and for the next few days, he was quiet again. His pain settled as a kind of glimmer around him, dulling his experiences and blurring his sense of time. His thoughts were cyclical and compulsive, but each time they repeated he learned to believe them a little less. In pieces, he listened to the people around him, how they shared their stories freely, no matter how complex and troubling. How one man had left an abusive marriage. How another had watched his friend die. How several had spent time in prison. Lou had never heard people speak of their darkness so openly. Or respond to the darkness of others not with repulsion or fear but with a gentle knowing, a simple acceptance that their story was theirs and so was their pain, but it was still somehow familiar, common, and bearable. Lou did not share his own story then, but he began to see it differently, as something that itself was not good or bad, but simply his. What had happened to him, and what he had made happen. He felt the stirrings of calmness.
But now it is day eight, and a spot fire has brought the flames upon them all, and his story becomes again a deep well of shame, a waste of a life. He is going to die at the age of 18 because all he has ever learned to do is to run away from his problems, and now his problem is a wall of fire, but no one will miss him anyway—not his father, not Rachel, not the bundle of cells that could have led him into a different story entirely. He wishes he had at least the comfort of a god, but the possibility of some greater force looking out for him has never been more than a fairytale. The people he is sure will die with him do not even know him. He is not sure he is even worth knowing.
Everything is heat and smoke and roar and then, again, there are hands on him, pushing him toward something, forcing him to move. Suddenly there is yellow in front of him, and people are yelling the same words over and over but he cannot comprehend them. They are moving in a line. He is more present in his body than he has ever been. He feels every sensation and every ounce of fear pulsing through him. Each step he expects the descent of a tree or a flame, the end. But they keep going. Their faces are full of soot and their bodies are drenched in sweat. Their heavy boots are stomping through brush and ash.
The scene changes. The flames are no longer in their ears. The ground beneath them is all black. They stop. They turn and watch the fire cover the terrain they have just walked on. They can still feel the heat. But they are safe. Their ground has already burned. It has already been destroyed, all signs of life scorched, and now the flames cannot touch it.
Later, of course, new life will emerge. Beginnings that could not have survived under the canopy of old trees. But for now, in the face of total wreckage, it is only because of what it lost that the earth can protect and hold them all. In the ruins, Lou is safe.
Monica Anderson is a writer, runner, educator, and Oregonian who currently lives in the Upper Peninsula, where she is an MFA candidate at Northern Michigan University. Her work has appeared in Buckman Journal, Panorama Journal, Please See Me, and elsewhere.
Header image generated by AI prompts using Adobe Photoshop.
